[Discuss] AT&T eliminating copper phone lines

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

> I've been using an Obitalk VOIP gateway and the free Google Voice service as
> my primary landline for almost 6 years now. I too have long been
> hard-of-hearing, and it's truly annoying how the mobile-phone companies
> persist in over-compressing voice calls at a time of plenty in back-end
> network bandwidth.

CELP compression - the stuff that sounds bad, and sounds doubly bad if
you ever listen to music through it - was part of the standard until
VoLTE came along. LTE-based calls use better codecs that sound much
better.

The problem is not back end bandwidth, it's over-the-air bandwidth.
Non-LTE calling is done using inefficient protocols that use a lot of
it. IP calling over pre-LTE data standards isn't feasible because
their latency is too high.